See Disclaimer Below.

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

, , ,

“Bottle Tree,” A Poem by Amy Susan Wilson

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry, Writing on August 15, 2012 at 8:45 am

Amy Susan Wilson is a writer living in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and her work has appeared in the Southern Literary Review, Southern Women’s Review, Red River Review, and other journals.

Bottle Tree

My Nanna’s backyard elm

outfitted with blue, red

green glass bottles

tied with chicken wire the width

of a hen’s beak

to each branch.

 

            Scarin’ crows away,

Gram’s explained.

Wind chimes hung like gaudy ear bobs

from lobes of lower branches:

a lady bug with silver spoons,

that copper kettle adorned with

aqua beads, a faded red tin cup,

the kind hobos carry

while riding the rail.

 

Each sunset

those Blue Nun bottles

soft purple

like a mood ring

or Goddess moon from Jupiter.

          Mama back at Griffin,

I’d sigh,

run my palm

down the spine

of charcoal bark.

 

I never told Nanna,

kids at school

just Ruby-Lucille

me winning

a big red Escalade

Firelake Casino

someday I would—

 

Mama and me

we’d chomp green M&Ms

all the way to California,

big blue ice chest

the kind with wheels

loaded with biscuits

Pepsi, Paydays

strawberry ice cream bars galore.

 

Grams calls Griffin

          A  nerve hospital

           A mini-vacation from life.

 

Church ladies whisk

meatloaf

salisbury steak

Sunday afternoons,

          Grams too old to handle a child

          This stage of life

          All by herself.

 

Always,

Mrs. Harlan Dodge Simpson

presses a green bean casserole,

Old Testament

coloring book

to my palms—

 

lambs, cows

slaughtered on an altar,

carnation red crayon

for blood

twelve pack Crayola.

           

Ruby Lucille always waits,

backyard,

those bottles

clink like diamond bracelets

TV stars load their arms with.

          “Well Lady Bug,

          A fine plan

          You and your Mama,

          Heading to L.A.

          Someday,”     

Ruby Lucille whispers

in her bottle tree language,

Ruby Lucille

never laughing

never  letting on.

, , , ,

Unraveling

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Law, Literature, Writing on July 27, 2012 at 8:45 am

Rose Auslander is a partner at a Wall Street law firm and Poetry Editor of Folded Word Press. Co-editor of the Twitter anthology On A Narrow Windowsill, Rose has read her poems on NPR; her poem “For You Mothers” received a Pushcart nomination; “Oh My” received a Best of the Net nomination. She is a Regular Contributor to Referential Magazine, and her work appears in cur-ren-cy, Right Hand Pointing, Cyclamens and Swords, The Dead Mule, and Red Dirt Review. And she blogs!

The following excerpt, which first appeared here in The Mom Egg, is part of Rose’s upcoming memoir, A Pencil on the Ceiling, about surviving as a pregnant first-year law student nursing her way through her diploma

My infant, my daughter, my beautiful red-blond, blue-eyed child, lies in my arms, in my bed.  An unseasonably cold September afternoon, raining, chill, the chill that seeps into a person’s veins like formaldehyde.  My three-month-old daughter sleeps in my arms; my poor, embalmed arms feel nothing.

I wrap up in the afghan I crocheted for her, the yarn I worked into granny square by square, month after pregnant month, obsessively, mathematically, finding new permutations of pastel blue, pink, yellow and green to draw through into white, infinite borders of white.  I sit wrapped in yarn, unraveling.

How did I ever think I could start with yarn and crochet a garden of colors for a baby?

If only I could sleep, sleep . . .

No, study first. 

Law school.  How did I ever think I could get through law school with a baby at home?

A pile of case books rests on the pillow next to my infant daughter, next to markers of neon blue, pink, yellow and green, and pencils for thoughts, all for my numb hands to try to draw through into white, infinite pages of white.

Come on, just study. 

Or at least color:  Blue for facts (what happened in the world to cause the dispute), pink for procedural history (what happened with the case in the courts), yellow for the holding (what the court decided), green for what I can’t understand.

I drift off into National Business Lists, Inc. v. Dun & Bradstreet, Inc., 552 F. Supp. 89 (N.D. Ill. 1982), sleepily coloring in facts like:  “The customer does not itself receive much of the information contained in the computer data base.”  Feeling much like that customer, it takes me forever to get to the holding, and by that time, I’ve forgotten what the case was about.  I’m stranded somewhere in endless fields of green.

Hoping somehow to get through the hundreds of assigned pages, I try to read cases while holding baby Freddie, nursing her, even changing her.  But I swear, each time she nurses herself to sleep, she sucks more of my brain cells out with the milk.  And the milk/ammonia scent?  A knockout drug for those of us who’ve been staying up until 2 a.m. each night reading cases, and getting up again at 5 a.m. to nurse a baby-who-will-not-sleep.

Why won’t she let me sleep?

By 3 a.m., I put down the books, and close my eyes.  There are still endless unread pages of unintelligible heretofores, theretofores, therefors, and wherefores in every subject.  If I can’t get my brain back from wherever it has gone, I’ll never get to  my environmental law reading, where I’m already dangerously behind.

How did I ever think marking up cases in colors would somehow turn me into a lawyer?

, , , ,

Joyce Corrington Publishes You Trust Your Mother

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, News and Current Events, News Release, Novels, Writing on July 23, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Joyce Corrington, a friend and supporter of this site (see here, here, and here), has just released the final installment of the New Orleans mystery series begun by her and her late husband John William Corrington.  Learn more about this book, You Trust Your Mother, at Joyce’s website.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Law in Melville and Hawthorne

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Writing on July 11, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Law was a common trope in the writing of nineteenth century American authors.  The jurist Roscoe Pound referred to nineteenth century America as a “frontier society” that was struggling to define what law was.  Justice John Marshall was carving out the jurisdiction of the nation’s high court, even as Andrew Jackson challenged Marshall’s authority to do so.  (Jackson supposedly said, in regard to Worcester v. Georgia, that Marshall had made his decision, “now let him enforce it.”)  American jurisprudents were seeking to reconcile the contradictions between liberty and equality on the one hand—the ideals of the revolutionary generation—with the peculiar institution of slavery on the other.  The ethos of republicanism and the ideal of open discourse clashed with the legislative attempts among the Southern states to resurrect Roman code to validate slave laws, even as the judiciary, on all levels and in all states, attempted to incorporate British common law into a new setting with unique problems.  In short, law was in flux during the nineteenth century in America, and writers like Melville and Hawthorne picked up on this problem and gave it unique and sometimes troubling articulation in their literature.

The “facts” in Benito Cereno are strikingly similar to the facts in one of America’s most memorable cases: U.S. v. The Amistad, in which John Quincy Adams, among others, served as an attorney.  In both “cases,” slaves took over a slave ship, killed some of their white captives, and demanded that the remaining white shipmen return the boat to Africa.  Rather than doing that, however, the white shipmen steered a path toward America, where the unsuspecting crew of another ship, sensing something wrong, came to assist.  These fact patterns raise sensitive and disturbing questions about the law.  What is justice?  How should it be determined?  Which party is right, and what does it mean to be right or to have rights?  For that matter, what is the law to begin with?

In Benito Cereno, Cereno is the captain of the ship bearing slaves, and it is from Delano’s perspective that we learn, gradually, that a slave revolt has occurred and that Cereno is being held captive by Africans.  Delano is the captain of a different ship who has come aboard Cereno’s ship to assist Cereno’s apparently distressed crew.  The leader of the slave revolt, Babo, himself a slave, is always by Cereno’s side, thereby giving Delano the impression that Cereno has a loyal servant.  What Delano eventually discovers is that the slaves have spared the lives of only Cereno and a few other whites in order that these whites return the ship to Africa.

In Amistad as in Benito Cereno, the African slaves had been removed from their homeland, without their consent, and taken to a foreign land among alien peoples for the sole purpose of perpetual enslavement.  On the other hand, the white shipmen had, it could be argued, complied with the law of the sea in conducting these actions, and they were murdered by mutinying slaves.  The problem here is that neither side seems to represent an unquestionably moral or obviously right position.  Slavery is evil, but so is murder.  Melville, perhaps realizing the literary possibilities created by this tension, subjects this challenging set of circumstances to rigorous interrogation by way of a captivating narrative. Read the rest of this entry »

, , ,

What They Left, Part Two

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Short Story, Writing on July 6, 2012 at 8:45 am

A.G. Harmon is a professor at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.  He received his J.D. from The University of Tennessee, his M.A. from The University of New Hampshire, and his Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America.  A nominee for The Pushcart Prize in the essay, he was a 1998-1999 Richard Weaver Graduate Fellow and winner of the 1995 Glen Writers Fellowship.  He received the 1994 Milton Center Postgraduate Writing Fellowship and was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. His novel A House All Stilled (The University of Tennessee Press, 2002) was awarded The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2002 and was nominated for the Virginia Literary Prize and the Pen-Hemingway Award. His novel Fortnight was the runner-up for The William Faulkner Prize for the Novel in 2007. His book on the law in Shakespeare, Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, was published by State University of New York Press in 2004.

The following story first appeared in The Bellingham Review, Volume XXIX, no. 1, Issue 57 (2006) and is reprinted with express permission from the author.

…continued from part one….

“You sell car parts—and shit like that?” the policeman had asked. He leaned against the iron post that held up the front porch.

“That’s right.”

“You own that junk stand? Up there on the road?

He was fat and sweaty and smelled of green after-shave. He chewed stick after stick of gum. Another policeman, bony, with a mustache as thin as a boy’s, sat on the front step. He dug dog shit from the soles of his patent leather shoes with a piece of tree bark.

“I sell parts,” he had answered.

“Must be doing pretty good, if you’re this busy,” the fat one said.

“It’s never too good.”

“Well, must be. You were there instead of here.”

He unwrapped the foil from a white stick of gum—spearmint—and shoved it into his full mouth. “Why’d you leave him, in the state he was in?”

“I have to work.”

The fat man frowned, squinted. “He stays—stayed—here while you were at work?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t get nobody to stay with him? In the state he’s in?”

“No.”

The man popped his gum. “How long did he stay alone?”

“‘Til I got done.” Read the rest of this entry »

, , ,

What They Left, Part One

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Short Story, Writing on July 5, 2012 at 8:45 am

A.G. Harmon is a professor at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.  He received his J.D. from The University of Tennessee, his M.A. from The University of New Hampshire, and his Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America.  A nominee for The Pushcart Prize in the essay, he was a 1998-1999 Richard Weaver Graduate Fellow and winner of the 1995 Glen Writers Fellowship.  He received the 1994 Milton Center Postgraduate Writing Fellowship and was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. His novel A House All Stilled (The University of Tennessee Press, 2002) was awarded The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2002 and was nominated for the Virginia Literary Prize and the Pen-Hemingway Award. His novel Fortnight was the runner-up for The William Faulkner Prize for the Novel in 2007. His book on the law in Shakespeare, Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, was published by State University of New York Press in 2004.

The following story first appeared in The Bellingham Review, Volume XXIX, no. 1, Issue 57 (2006) and is reprinted with express permission from the author. 

What They Left

Each call stood out from the next: a soft moan, a low horn, rising. The man’s head lifted an inch. His eyes wrinkled at the corners. His tongue touched the top of his palate, as if he smelled fire.

There was nothing to keep him from his work except these sounds, and even they only made him pause for a moment—turn small, keen eyes toward the line of hills, colored black in the last orange light, from which the sounds seemed to come. Then he returned to his labor.

A pen-light hung from the raised hood of the car’s engine, where his hands—the knuckles scabbed and some bleeding—toiled inside the motor. His flesh was raw and cracked and chapped from too much wind, too much weather without gloves, too little idleness.

He had lived past his middle age at the end of this tree-lined road. He had cut the way himself, a narrow alley leading from his back door, through the rear of his property, and ending at his store on the highway. There he sold old things, used things, gathered together by function, then by size, then by cost. Besides him, the only people that used the road were those who abandoned things alongside it. He did not know when it had become a castaway point, but it had happened slowly, and he had noticed it, slowly. After a time, as he made his way home, he began to find iceboxes, dishwashers, gates, air conditioners, lengths of fence, rolls of barbed wire. In the end, weeds took them.

Sometimes he would stop to see if he wanted any of the discarded things for himself—to salvage, reclaim, sell. If anything could be saved, he would slip back at night with a pulley and tackle, winch it against a tree, then slide what he wanted up from the ditch. Sometimes people got there before him though, so he had to work fast. Other times people took back what they had left. Once, at his store, a man claimed a tiller that had taken three days to fix:

“This is mine,” the man had said, his eyes bright, sharp. “I can tell.”

He shook his head, widened his stance so that his body stood at an angle to the other.

“I found it on the road.”

“It’s mine.”

“Not now.”

The other had placed his hand on the plastic grip, leaned over the top of the thing, glared: “You stole it. Prove you didn’t.”

So he had learned. He had to be careful of what he touched. He had to change things, just enough.

This time, though, they had worked too quickly, had been interrupted. He himself might have surprised them, coming down the road. He was thin, but tall, so his feet hit the earth hard and loud as he walked, grinding in the chert. They could have heard him a long way off. Nothing else accounted for how much they had left. The stereo had been slipped out, and some of the engine broken free, but he could work with what remained. It lay, piece by piece, cupped inside his hands; cold and slick and greasy; with his tools, it could be made to tick and turn warm.

It was only a day or so there; not even that. It had come to his notice that morning, as he walked to work. He might have overlooked it, had not the first of the sun picked out lights in the black paint. The car had been left off the shoulder, down a bank and beside a stand of pines.

His wrench slid over a bolt deep beneath the battery plate. It was a tight fit, but it caught the bolt’s angles. After several yanks, the wrench fell into the familiar release and give of loosening. If all went well, the engine would start soon, with new plugs and a new fan for the radiator. He would have to decide what to do with it then, though. The law would come into play. He could not say how, but he would have to decide.

His cap made his head hot. He pulled his hands out of the body and pushed his hat’s bill back from his brow. He thought for a moment and ran his fingers over whiskers, three days grown. He raked them back and forth. The bite warmed his face.

There was more to do, but not now. In the morning, then.

It was a small climb up from the stash of trees back to the road. He picked up a bucket of greasy tools, held the light between his teeth, and clawed at the grass with his free hand to keep his purchase. Once there, he took the light from his mouth and shined it in the direction he would take. The beam bobbed before him as he walked—a soft, collapsing tunnel through the dark. The tools jangled in the bucket.

The sounds returned: Two. Three. Silence.

He marched on through three more calls, and rests, and calls, before he stopped and spun toward them, swiveling on his down heel. He stared into the woods for a moment—a gray, ashen blue—then commenced to walk. He kept up the same stride as before, but with the hills facing.

There was no point going on until his mind was free. They might have come back—keys in hand. And he would not surrender his work to theirs. It was no more theirs than his.

He stopped to glance back at the car, then slowly ran his light down its length, fender to bumper, marking the body.

It was almost lost in the dark, now. It would take a man with a light, now.

To find the sounds he would have to crawl down the opposite bank, which fell off at a stiff grade. The light and the bucket together would be too much to carry. He would need a free hand to compensate, so he set the bucket down and drew out a hammer by its claw. He hefted it twice, then once more—once for each sound he had heard—and sat himself on the bank’s edge. He went belly first, sliding, the damp ground pressing through his clothes, kissing at his skin. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , ,

Matthew Simmons Reviews J. Mark Hart’s “Fielder’s Choice”

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Southern Literary Review, Writing on June 26, 2012 at 8:00 am

Matthew Simmons was born and raised in Whiteville, North Carolina.  He lived in Raleigh for eight years, where he went to college at North Carolina State University, roasted coffee for a living, and developed a taste for single-malt Scotch.  Currently a Ph.D. student in English at the University of South Carolina, Matt lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he tries to garden and regularly rides his bicycle in coat and tie.

The following review appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.

Years ago, after reading Richard Russo’s Mohawk, I decided I needed more flexibility in labeling fiction.  Obviously, there was pulp, there was genre fiction, and there was the rarified air of “lit-tra-ture.”  But what I’d found in Mohawk seemed to somehow occupy parts of all of those labels simultaneously and effortlessly.  I needed a name for this effortless occupation of different registers, and it came to me halfway through another, similar book.  What I was reading was, in fact, the Great American Middlebrow Novel.  Such is a book that tries to be more than an afternoon or a weekend’s entertainment; nevertheless, its writing is highly readable.  It does not set out to explore the eternal complexities of the human experience, but rather tries to show the suppleness and myriad realities that make up an individual or a group’s experience of a specific place, at a particular time.  That last bit is incredibly important.  The GAMN is a book of specificities, of particularities, and it plumbs these specificities and particularities to give us some access to the localized truths of a moment.  J. Mark Hart’s forthcoming debut novel, Fielder’s Choice, tries its damnedest to show itself as worthy of the title, and succeeds, with varying degrees of success, at achieving this goal.

Hart’s locale and moment are Birmingham, 1969.  Brad Williams, our narrator, wants to avoid the hellish fires of the steel mills.  But there is a fate worse than the mills also possibly awaiting him:  the jungles of Vietnam.  Working class, his only hopes at escape are for his athletic prowess on the baseball diamond to win him a college scholarship, as well as drawing a high draft number.  The first of these hopes is immediately compromised—a lifetime shortstop, senior year finds Brad moved over to second to accommodate Robbie, a black student transferred to West Lake High via integration, who is a superior shortstop to Brad in every way.

And thus are the specifics of Hart’s novel—a Birmingham trying to live down the specter of Bull Connor’s hoses and dogs, and a young man trying to find his place in this uncertain newness.  At its best, Fielder’s Choice does a truly wonderful job of presenting a city struggling to understand itself and an 18-year-old boy trying both to fit into this city and get out of it.  Hart’s presentation of Brad is, in many ways, wonderfully well-done.  Similarly, the city’s tensions are admirably sketched, and Birmingham, as a character itself, feels incredibly alive and compelling.  Hart’s debut novel thus promises to join the august company of the Great American Middlebrow novel, an achievement to be lauded—especially when the author, an attorney by day, is only moonlighting as a novelist.

Promising though it may be, Fielder’s Choice is also, at times, deeply problematic.  The prose can be clunky and wooden:  explaining his friend’s father’s drinking habits, Brad speaks of “[the father’s] customary can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, or, in his vernacular, a ‘PBR.’”  Contrast that passage with any number of gorgeous moments from Brad’s courtship of Susie and you’ll find yourself frustrated—Hart can, at times, be an immensely lyrical and even beautiful writer, and you’ll wish he always was.  But significantly more troubling than some hiccups with the prose is the novel’s reliance on flat, stereotypical characters.  Of course the hippie would be a Yankee, and of course he would drive a VW with a day-glo peace sign on the back window.  Of course the main antagonist would be named Bubba, and would be a violent, reactionary, bigoted redneck.  Robbie, the African-American shortstop who forces Brad to move positions, often seems like little more than a plot device and a means for developing Brad’s character—a shame and even an error, as Robbie begins as one of the most promising characters in the novel.

And while Paxton, the Yankee hippie, becomes more sympathetic as the novel progresses, it is not because his character deepens, but because Brad becomes more involved in the anti-war movement.  Meanwhile, the Bubbas of the novel are never any more than boogeymen, “hicks,” to use Brad’s distressingly frequent verbiage, who wave the Confederate flag and stand in the way of progress.  Near the novel’s end, Brad glowing speaks of Birmingham moving into the “New South,” and we understand that Brad understands Bubba and his ilk not so much as people as impediments to the birth of this “New South.”  Brad’s voice thus carries a nascent sense of cosmopolitan elitism.  And while I see this as a legitimate and even necessary act of characterization, I’m nevertheless troubled that Brad gets off scot-free in this regard.  The Bubbas of the novel, and of Southern history, are of course inexcusably wrong in their racial attitudes and certainly on the wrong side of history.  But this does not make them any less complexly human, something that Brad never recognizes, and something Hart never calls him to task for.  We cannot present a fully nuanced picture of the South at this time—which is, again, what I think Hart wants to do—if we merely write off the Bubbas of the world, wrong-headed and misguided as they may be, as merely villainous “hicks” resembling Snively Whiplash more than flawed human beings.

This not to denigrate how fine the novel is on the whole.  Brad himself is a deeply compelling and well-realized hero.  Susie, Brad’s love interest and female counterpart, helps to Hart’s exploration of 1969 Birmingham in sophisticated ways, and Susie and Brad’s relationship is at turns soaring, titillating, crushingly painful, and immensely familiar to us all.  Hart presents the changing relationships between Brad and his childhood best friend BJ, as well as between Brad and his father, powerfully and complexly.  Brad, and those characters closest to him, are wonderfully rendered, strongly presented, and, at times, heart-wrenchingly achieved.

This is all to say that Fielder’s Choice is a novel of real promise, despite some significant problems.  Mr. Hart has given us a very fine representation of a boy becoming a man in a place and time that are immensely complicated, and we are moved to joy and frustration alongside Brad.  It is a deeply enjoyable novel, one I found myself tearing through in three days—no short task for a nearly 500-page book.  And while it has its problems—the writing is sometimes too flat, the characters often too stock, the ending perhaps too neat—I am amazed, again, that this is a first novel by a man whose vocation is not fiction.  And while the problems may keep Mr. Hart’s first novel from being a Great American Middlebrow Novel, it comes mighty close.  Ultimately, Fielder’s Choice is a very good book about a very complex time.  I’m a fan.

, , , , , ,

“Fairy Tale Mail,” Poems by Margery Hauser

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Poetry, Writing on May 29, 2012 at 8:59 am
Margery Hauser is  a New york City poet whose work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Möbius, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Umbrella and other journals, both print and online.  Excerpts from “Fairy Tale Mail” (which she published here at The Literary Lawyer) have appeared or will soon appear in Ides of March and The First Literary Review. When she is not writing poetry, she can often be found dancing, knitting,  practicing yoga or working out with her tai chi broadsword.  She is a member of the Parkside Poetry Collective, for whose encouragement and support she ever grateful.
 
 
 
Subject: Civil suit
 
We’ve read the facts pursuant to the case
regarding your late husband’s sad demise.
Regretfully, a lawsuit has no trace
of merit and therefore we do advise
that evidence a-plenty proves his fall
occurred while in commission of a crime.
No fault accrues to Pig and Pig, et al.
No damages are due you at this time.
        His huffing and his puffing further show
        a pre-existing illness and although
        this wasn’t cause of death it surely must
        support that bringing suit would be unjust. 
        Your husband died attempting a break-in
         and so this suit is one you cannot win.
 
 
 
To: NRimer@mere_l’oye.net
Subject: Pumpkineater v. Pumpkineater
 
My client in an affidavit swears
that he confined his faithless wife because
she had indulged in numerous affairs –
he didn’t think he’d broken any laws.
Her infidelities made him so sad
and left him feeling helpless, in disgrace;
in fact, you might say that she drove him mad
by throwing her amours smack in his face.
These acts diminished his capacity
        to tell right from wrong. Her audacity
        impelled him to this deed.  He does regret
        his rashness and hopes she can just forget,
        forgive and drop the charges that she brought.
        He simply was distressed and overwrought.
 
 
 
Subject: re: Pumpkineater v. Pumpkineater
From: NRimer@mere_l’oye.net
 
Mrs. Pumpkineater’s life was hell
when Peter, in a fit of jealous rage,
confined her in a fetid pumpkin shell
no better than a jail cell or a cage.
She swears that she was faithful, always true
and kept her marriage vows although her mate
treated her most harshly in our view.
He threatened violence if she came home late.
        She’s willing to drop charges and agree
        to just divorce the beast, let him go free.
        She wishes he would suffer as she did
        but asks for nothing more than to be rid
        of this abusive, cruel and jealous spouse.
        Oh, by the way, she wants the car and house.
 
 
 
Subject: State v. Farmer’s Wife
 
Regarding claims by Mouse and Mouse and Mouse:
details of their de-tailing do support
the charge against the farmer’s vicious spouse.
We demand this case be tried in court.
The victims all are visually impaired
and wandered by pure chance across her path.
Under oath they all have so declared, 
but she responded with unbridled wrath!
        It’s clear she meant to take each Mouse’s life,
        her WMD a carving knife.
        We know that rodents often are maligned.
        We know society neglects the blind. 
        The only way the Mice will be requited
        is if their assailant is indicted.
 
 
 
Subject: Name Change
 
The miller’s daughter to my great surprise
has ruined my business plan – a sort of game
that asked contestants to vie for a prize
by guessing my most strange and secret name.
How that was managed she would never tell –
it’s not as if I bandied it about.
But she’s the queen and my plan’s shot to hell.
It looks as if my luck has just run out.
        I had ideas – big ones – they’re all a bust.
        She found me out so I must now adjust.
        I’ve given it much thought and I’ve assessed
        the possibilities that won’t be guessed. 
        Please amend the records; let them show
        that my last name is Stiltskin, first name Joe.

, , , , , , ,

“Gone,” Edited with Photography by Nell Dickerson

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Humanities, Nineteenth-Century America, Southern History, Southern Literary Review, The South, Writing on May 9, 2012 at 7:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following review originally appeared here in the Southern Literary Review.

I’ve always maintained a spectator’s curiosity in the rituals and practices of photography.  I can’t take a good picture, no matter which side of the camera I’m on, but I appreciate the idea of reducing the world to a more manageable form, something I can look at and admire without getting overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and kinetics of it all.

I used to have a friend who was a photographer, and I would watch her take pictures.  She tried, once or twice, to teach me the nuances and particulars of photography, but I’m too proud to fail at new activities, so I strive never to undertake them.

Photographs are, folks say, moments stuck in time.  That makes them especially melancholy if their subjects, as it were, are decaying, rotting, or dying.  That’s what I realized when I leafed through the pages of Gone, a brilliant, conversation-starting, coffee-table book bearing the subtitle “A Heartbreaking Story of the Civil War,” and the sub-sub-title “A Photographic Plea for Preservation.”

Gone makes history even as it documents history.  Its images of antebellum Southern churches, plantations, and homes—some dilapidated, some just barely restored—ought to remind Southerners of the need for preserving the finest monuments of, and to, our complicated history.

That the photographer is Nell Dickerson, cousin to the late, great historian and novelist Shelby Foote, who needs no introduction to readers of this publication—although we editors have given him one—only adds a sense of authenticity to this project.  It’s as if in image and word and authorial kin, the book is tied to a past that struggles, and fails, to remain present; and it’s in that failing that the book achieves its most meaningful and poignant expression.

We Southerners place a premium on the fixed, the immutable, the known, perhaps because we understand that the things we value—family, hearth, home, community, place, religion—are bound to change.  We mourn change as we mourn loss, because all change entails loss, and it’s our tendency to mourn that gives us a unique, constructive identity.

We define ourselves as a people who have lost, or have lost something.  It’s a position that doesn’t survive interrogation, but there it is, a tragic ethos (and, for that matter, pathos) that we hope will stay the same when all else is, if not different, then almost unfamiliar.  Almost. Read the rest of this entry »

, , ,

Some Poetry by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Poetry, Writing on May 2, 2012 at 8:00 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following lines come from two dissents by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  I have rendered the lines in poetic form to suggest that Holmes’s writing is poetic, perhaps even inspired by Modern American poets such as William Carlos Williams.

Black & White Taxi & Transfer Co. v. Brown & Yellow Taxi & Transfer Co.[1]

A Poem[2] (1928)

It is very hard to resist the impression

that there is one august corpus

to understand which clearly is the only task

of any Court concerned.

If there were such a transcendental body of law

outside of any particular State

but obligatory within it unless and until changed by statute,

the Courts of the United States might be right in using

their independent judgment

as to what it was.

But there is no such body of law.

The fallacy and illusion that I think exist

consist in supposing that there is this outside thing to be found.

Law is a word used with different meanings,

but law in the sense in which courts speak of it today

does not exist

without some definite authority

behind it.

 

Gitlow v. New York[3]

A Poem[4] (1925)

Every idea

is an incitement.

It offers itself for belief

and if believed

it is acted on

unless some other belief

outweighs it

or some failure of energy

stifles the movement

at its birth.

The only difference

between the expression

of an opinion and an incitement

in the narrower sense

is the speaker’s enthusiasm

for the result.

Eloquence may set fire

to reason.

But whatever may be thought

of the redundant discourse

before us

it had no chance of starting

a present conflagration.

 

 

[1] See 276 U.S. 518 (1928) (Holmes, dissenting).

[2] My addition.

[3] See 268 U.S. 652 (1925) (Holmes, dissenting).

[4] My addition.